Month: November 2023

Anxiety is something that is common all over the United States. Pretty much everybody experiences some type of anxiety whether they are taking a test, going on a first date, or just have a lot of work to get done and are overwhelmed. Having anxiety is not a disorder it shows that you are human but there is a limit to having a normal amount of anxiety and having GAD otherwise known as General Anxiety Disorder.

There are multiple symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder they are… Persistent and uncontrollable tenseness and apprehension (for 6 months or more), autonomic arousal (sweating, palpitation, dry mouth, lightheadedness, upset stomach, or hyperventilation), or being unable to identify or avoid the cause of the feelings that you are experiencing. GAD interferes with people’s lives because they have persistent anxiety that does not go away easily and has to be treated. According to the NIH (National Institutes of Health), treatments can be psychotherapy, medication such as SSRIs which are serotonin reuptake inhibitors or Anti-anxiety medications such as benzodiazepines. Other treatments can be support groups or healthy habits such as going to the gym or any form of exercise, reading, or even meditation.

There is a girl that I know who used to be anxious about everything she would stress about tests, homework, and even Snapchat if someone did not respond fast enough to her. I was always curious why she was like this. There was one time after a test that she took she was freaking out. I calmed her down and asked her what was wrong. She said that she thinks she failed the test and that her academic career is over. I calmed her down and come to find out she has generalized anxiety disorder but it was self-diagnosed. So, I told her we would go to the gym every day so that she could take her mind off of life and worries for one hour and just focus on herself. We did that for a year straight and her anxiety was so much better. I would say it was cured or anything like that but she was a lot more calmed and not as worked up all of the time. To this day she goes to the gym daily and is handling her anxiety amazingly.

Sources:

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2022). Generalized anxiety disorder: When worry gets out of Control. National Institute of Mental Health. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/generalized-anxiety-disorder-gad

Have you ever wondered why we feel the pain others feel when getting injured or rejected, or the happy feelings someone gets when their significant other proposes? The answer to that question would be mirror neurons. Mirror neurons in the brain of animals and humans activate during observational learning, they fire when someone performs an action and when someone watches someone else perform the same action. We watch someone do something we experience it with them. When someone scrapes their knee on the concrete we somehow feel that pain even though our knee is perfectly ok. Mirror neurons help us experience and feel the things others we watch and observe are experiencing and feeling. This one movie I watched called Frozen was about three people who get stuck on a ski lift. They are stuck there for days in the freezing cold up on a ski lift with no one there to help or rescue them. The one character decides to try and jump off the ski lift. He lands and breaks both of his legs. The scene shows his knees all bloody with the bone sticking out while he is screaming in pain telling his friends on the lift how he cant feel his legs and how the bone is sticking out. Watching this scene and even writing about it makes me extremely uncomfortable, the feeling I get in my stomach thinking about that and the weak, weird feeling I get in my knees is a reaction I get because of mirror neurons. Even though my knees aren’t broken and my bones aren’t sticking out I still feel as if they were. I am observing and watching someone else experience an injury like this, a pain like this, and the mirror neurons in my brain activate making me feel a feeling as though I was the one in that situation. There are so many feelings and experiences mirror neurons make us experience, a way for us to understand others pain, others happiness and sadness. All of these feelings we feel and don’t know why we feel them are because of mirror neurons.

During a preschool party many years ago, I was taught a very young lesson in taste aversion when trying to eat eggs. Some time after having more than enough, I experienced an unexpected wave of nausea. The food I used to enjoy now triggered an instinctual aversion, a rapid transformation in my preferences. The experience taught me the potent influence of associative learning on our instinctual preferences. From then on, the mere sight of scrambled eggs elicits an unpleasant reaction, a reminder that our taste experiences are intricately woven with memories and sensations, shaping our future cravings and aversions. This is known as taste aversion.
Taste aversion is a psychological phenomenon that encapsulates the swift development of a strong dislike or avoidance towards a particular food or drink following a negative experience. This unique form of classical conditioning challenges the conventional understanding of learned associations, as it often requires only a single pairing of a specific taste with an adverse consequence, such as nausea or illness. Unlike the more gradual process of classical conditioning, taste aversion exhibits a remarkable specificity and durability.
One classic example of taste aversion involves a person consuming a specific food shortly before falling ill. The association between the taste of that food and the subsequent illness forms rapidly, leading to an enduring aversion to the once-favored item. This aversion is adaptive, serving as a protective mechanism to prevent the consumption of potentially harmful substances in the future.
Taste aversion highlights the intricate interplay between the sensory experiences of taste and the emotional responses tied to them. It showcases the brain’s ability to create strong connections between flavors and their consequences, shaping our dietary preferences in profound ways. This phenomenon is not limited to humans; animals also exhibit taste aversion, emphasizing its evolutionary significance as a survival mechanism.
Understanding taste aversion sheds light on the complexities of human behavior and learning, illustrating how our brains navigate the world through a delicate balance of pleasure and aversion. It underscores the powerful impact that singular taste experiences can have on our long-term culinary preferences, revealing the intricate web of associations woven into the fabric of our taste perceptions.

The psychology concept I’ve chosen to talk about for my second post is the ideas of Phobias. According to the text book, a phobia “is a specific fear of a certain object, situation, or activity”. The expression of this fear can manifest in various forms, ranging from general anxiety or discomfort to the occurrence of intense panic attacks. The fear of the object is defined as being irrational yet persistent. Common phobias include a fear of heights, a fear of dogs, a fear of enclosed spaces and many more. Some psychologists say that certain fears, like the fear of snakes, could be connected to our evolutionary past; our ancestors were much more likely to interact with snakes than us, but they passed down that fear. Phobias can either be a minor inconvenience or a genuinely debilitating aspect of someone’s life. In some cases, it’s easy to avoid your phobias; don’t go into the elevator, don’t go to the amphibian section of the zoo etc., but others, it’s based on situations that are not able to be gauged or predicted. Agoraphobia is an example of this; it’s “anxiety about being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult or embarrassing, or in which help may not be available”. It’s like a more intense version of social anxiety. People who have this fear tend to be recluse and avoid leaving the house because they’re terrified of the unpredictability of human interaction. This is not healthy, and leads to other mental illness.

Phobias are something to be taken seriously. I have seen content before on YouTube or TikTok where these content creators use their friends phobias to get a big reaction out of them and use them for more views and such. I think this type of content making is really gross. If someone has a serious, genuine phobia, no matter how ridiculous it may seem to you, you have to respect that. One video I remember in particular was where this girl was afraid of butterflies, and the people in the video, who were her friends, blindfolded her and led her inside of one of those butterfly houses at the zoo. Then, they made her take her blindfold off and she realized that she was in an enclosed space with something she was terrified of. She was rightfully upset, screaming and wanting to leave, and the other people there were comforting her, but also being slightly passive aggressive by being like “they’re not going to hurt you”, “see, you’re fine” and letting the butterfly land on their finger and putting it up to her face and such. I just find this type of exploitation for entertainment to be very odd. Why would I want to watch a girl be terrified for 12 minutes? Even if I thought that being afraid of butterflies was stupid and funny (which I don’t, by the way. That SpongeBob episode with the realistic butterfly terrified me), I think it’s weird to force this girl into a horrific situation for other people to laugh at. It would be different if it was a “watch me face my fears” situation, but who knows, maybe it was all fake, just for the views…

Firstly, the topic I chose to talk about is taste aversion. The concept of taste aversion is that humans are more apt to have an aversion to food if they become sick afterward even if they have no relation at all. Moreover, the effect can even happen in a single trail. If one feels sick hours after eating, the association is still made. Furthermore, this concept is a common trait that humans have in their lives. If someone eats something and then becomes ill afterward, they will form an association between the food and illness. This results in a protective attitude that your body generates and causes you to reject the food. Not only is the concept likely in humans, but animals develop it as well. Consequently, farmers use it to control predators. For example, if a wolf is hunting a sheep and you put a substance on the sheep to make the wolf nauseous, when the wolf tries to eat the sheep, it will associate the sheep with the feeling of being nauseous. The outcome of this is to protect farm animals and sway the wolves away from hunting them. The temptation to eat something one loves can diminish immensely when this conditioning happens. 

Secondly, I have experienced taste aversion before and I still can’t get over it even when I know it’s psychological. When I was a kid, my mom made me shrimp scampi. I used to love the dish so much; however, when she made it this time, I ended up getting extremely nauseous a couple hours afterward. I had to lay in bed for the rest of my night but couldn’t fall asleep due to the height of stomach pain I was in. Ever since that day, I can not eat, smell, or think about anything that has to do with shrimp. On the contrary, I know that this nausea could have been a result of many things and not just the shrimp that my mom made me that night. However, I still can not seem to get myself to eat it again. This experience is a clear representation of taste aversion and how it has affected my life directly. I put a negative spin on the shrimp she had cooked for me and made this assumption that the nausea was associated with the shrimp.

Operant conditioning is when there is an association made between behaviors and their resulting events. Psychologist B.F. Skinner came up with this idea and he believed that it was not internal thoughts and motivations that explained behavior instead it was observable causes of human behavior. He researched operant conditioning by performing experiments that put animals in boxes and training them to do unnatural behaviors. He came up with the idea that different types of reinforcers and punishments can strengthen or weaken behaviors.

There are two types of reinforcers including positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, and two types of punishment including positive punishment, and negative punishment. Reinforcement is used to increase a behavior. Specifically, positive reinforcement is when you increase a behavior by adding a positive stimulus. Negative reinforcement is when you are increasing a behavior by taking away something unwanted. On the other hand, punishment is used to decrease behavior. Positive punishment is when you add something unwanted to decrease a behavior. Negative punishment is when you take away something to decrease a behavior.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/negative-reinforcement.html

https://www.verywellmind.com/operant-conditioning-a2-2794863#:~:text=Operant%20 conditioning%20was%20first%20 described,in%20order%20to%20 explain%20behavior.

https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/2-3-behaviourist-psychology/

Classical conditioning is a form of learning that allows us to associate events together. Researchers found that people and animals could be conditioned to react both negatively and positively to a stimulus. Ivan Pavlov, was the first to discover this phenomenon in dogs. There are five components to classical conditioning; the unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, neutral stimulus, conditioned response, and conditioned response. In Pavlov’s experiments, dogs were conditioned to salivate after hearing a bell ring. Before doing this, he first discovered that his dogs salivated at the sight of food. In this case, the salivation is the unconditioned response, to the sight of food which is the unconditioned stimulus. To condition the dogs, Pavlov brought in a neutral stimulus, which was the ringing of a bell. He would pair the neutral stimulus(tone of a bell) and the unconditioned stimulus(food), to create the unconditioned response(salivation). After conditioning the dogs like this, the neutral stimulus(tone of a bell) would stimulate the unconditioned response(salivation). The neutral stimulus is now considered the conditioned stimulus which creates the conditioned response(salivation). Classical conditioning is not limited to dogs, people can be conditioned too. Example of this are little Albert which was a boy who was conditioned to hate rats.

In my own life, after learning about this in class, I got inspired to try and classically condition someone, but then I realized that I had unintentionally already done that. Every night, me and my roommate have tea together. It’s a great way to wind down and it’s good for the soul. However, my roommate never bothered to wash her mug until the day after. So every night, when I would be boiling the water, I would have to tell her to wash her mug. After a few times of telling her to do so, I no longer had to tell her. Now, I have realized that I have conditioned her to wash her mug because every night that I boil the water and open the tea bags, she goes and washes her mug.  Ain’t that funny?

Classical conditioning – statpearls – NCBI bookshelf. (n.d.). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470326/

In fourth grade, my teacher held a reading competition to encourage us all to read outside of our class assignments. She created a chart containing each student’s name, and she would place a sticker next to our name every time we finished a book. After every ten books we read, she would give us a small prize, such as a piece of candy or a small toy. Additionally, the first five students to read one hundred books received a gift card. I remember thinking that this was just a fun activity and a way to get some prizes, but my teacher knew better and was very strategic in presenting this competition to us. She was utilizing operant conditioning to get us to read more often.

Operant conditioning is a learning process that forms associations between behaviors and resulting events. Reinforcers, which are events that strengthen the resulting behavior, are used to guide the subject towards performing a desired behavior. One type of reinforcement is positive reinforcement, which strengthens the desired behavior by presenting positive stimuli.

 A recognizable example of operant conditioning is training a dog to do tricks by providing treats when they do the action correctly. In this case, giving the dog a treat is the positive reinforcement, and performing the trick is the desired behavior. In my example of my teacher’s reading competition, she provided positive reinforcement, the prizes, to lead us towards the desired behavior, reading. 

These examples of operant conditioning through the use of positive reinforcement prove that behavior can be learned and that rewarded behavior is more likely to occur. Positive reinforcement is used much more often than people are aware of, because it is effective and enjoyable for those receiving it. Operant conditioning with positive reinforcement is a useful tool for teaching, especially in a school setting or with children, because it creates

Taste Aversion is a conditioned and learned association between the taste of a particular food and an illness that is then associated with that food even if it had no relationship to the illness. If individuals are unwell after eating a certain food, they often develop a response and sensitivity to it and will therefore avoid eating it in the future. Taste aversion is very common in humans and is often used to control predators. For example, if you poison the meat a predator eats like a dead carcass, they will tend to avoid future consumption. The appeal of the flavor decreases, and it becomes undesirable if the meal results in sickness. This taste will now discourage consumption and discourage acts of predation. The new unpleasant taste will penalize the animal for attacking and biting its prey the next time it encounters that prey. This type of conditioning is unique in that it can happen in a single trial, even when there is an hour-long gap between the taste and poisonous stimuli, and it is not easily eliminated.

I have experienced taste aversion before. While I was traveling with my family in Pittsburg, we all went out to dinner. I ordered French onion soup. It was my first time trying this dish, but when we got back to our hotel, I ended up puking all my dinner up. Of course, it left a taste of the French onion soup in my mouth. As a result, I have not had French onion soup ever since because I know associate eating this soup with sickness. I do not know if the sickness was a result of eating the soup or a flu. However, I now can’t even look at or smell the soup without cringing. After all these years, the association of French onion soup with sickness is still prevalent with me today. This real life example shows how prevalent taste aversion can be.

Negative reinforcement is the psychological concept in Operant conditioning that removes unpleasant or aversive stimuli to increase the likelihood of a desired behavior. It strengthens a behavior by removing the negative stimuli, which results in the behavior being more likely to be repeated in similar situations. For example, the parents realize that that the baby is crying and requires something. To decrease the annoying crying parents gave a pacifier and got peace as the crying reduced.

My experience with Negative reaction is pretty recent. Coming to Penn State I realized that in the morning, all the bathrooms are occupied and it is really hard to find one to consistently find one and to shower. I would have to wait 10-20 minutes. It often felt like a game of musical chairs with showers being the thing that we would try to occupy. It was very stressful, as that usually delayed my day and my commitments. It became clear that I had to make a change, one way or another, to get a shower consistently.

My change was that I would wake up earlier at a time when no one was awake to take a shower. The first few mornings were challenging, waking up at 5:30 was a drag. However, I knew that this would make for a better day so I continued to wake up for the cleaner and quieter bathrooms. Over time, to present day, the early showers became a habit. It was satisfying to be the first to use the shower in a quiet and clean environment. It made my day to get the same shower that had the same water pressure and heat, and in fact got me ready in time to get to breakfast early too. The benefits of the earlier morning were innumerable allowing for increased productivity and making a stressful day less stressful.

This is an example of negative reinforcement, in the form of the morning rush, which pushed me to change my behavior for the better. My behavior removed the unwanted stimuli of all the bathrooms being occupied and being messy, and since I woke up early all of the were removed. This repeated routine without the aversive stimuli caused me to continue this behavior and continuously wake up early.

Zeissig, Eric. “Reinforcement from Baby and Parent’s Point of View.”  Barefoot Behavior, 9 June 2012, barefootbehavior.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/reinforcment-baby-and-parent/.